1/24/14 Episode 90: Stages of Design

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

Okay, I’m pulling out of my driveway! We all know what that means! It’s time for another Drive to Work.

Okay. So I spend a lot of time on this podcast talking about the history of Magic. Today, I’m going to talk about the history of design. This is something I’ve talked about in my column, but I thought it was worthy of a whole podcast.

Now I’ve talked about how I believe that design has gone through iterations and gone through improvement, that the technology of design has advanced. Now, before I begin, let me explain this carefully… what’s the quote? “If I can see farther than those that come before me, it’s because I stand on the shoulders of giants,” I believe is something like the quote. I’m paraphrasing.

What it means is, each advancement happened because of the work that was done before. The fact that the current design is very different from early design is no slight on early design. That each level, each step, each stage came about because we learned stuff from the prior stage and built upon it. And so that’s important to understand, that I’m talking about the evolution of the technology of design, and it came about because of all the hard work of all the people who’ve worked on design.

And so today my talk is nothing but looking at the awesome work that all the designers that have ever worked on Magic have done. And that every designer who has contributed anything has advanced and pushed us in the direction we have gone, and the place we have gotten to.

Okay. So right now, I divide Magic design into five stages. So today, I’m going to walk through the five stages, and explain what I think each stage was about, and how it led to the next stage.

We begin with the First Stage. Which begins in Alpha, and I have it running through Alliances. Okay, so when the set first began, I’m going to talk also about the Head Designer as far as the person who was in charge of the design overall, big picture. That you’ll see, the stages kind of follow Head Designers is partly how it plays out.

So essentially the Head Designer was Richard Garfield. He made the game, it was his baby, he definitely very much influenced how it functioned. So one of the things to understand, I mean Richard is a very prolific game designer, an awesome game designer, one of the things that Richard is a big, big fan of, and I as a game designer am very shaped like this because I consider Richard to be my mentor when it comes to game design, is Richard very much cares about the feel of the game. The flavor of the game, that Richard is someone who he wants the game to be about something, and that when he first made Magic, he was very invested in making all the cards feel as strong as they could.

So the sign of early Magic is it was very card-focused. That what Richard did is he figured out what he wanted to represent, and then he matched it as best he could. So if this was a white knight, well “What would a white knight do?” And he literally made mechanics, they’re Magic mechanics that got made because Richard’s like “Oh, well this would need to do something.” I think for example, first strike might exist in the game because Richard wanted to make a white knight, you know? And what would a white knight do? What would a knight do? Oh, well it would be good at fighting, it has its lance, in fact it probably could strike you before you could strike it. It would strike first!

And so Richard was very much about inspiring the design from the card. And that if you look through Alpha, in fact at work, actually we have Beta sheets, not Alpha sheets, but up in the office we have Beta sheets, and that the Beta sheets are framed, and something we look at all the time. And what your realize when you stare and you look at them, and I’ve looked at the Beta sheets lots, is Richard was trying very hard to create mechanics that matched the essence that he was trying to create.

That Richard was very into how cards related to each other, and how individual cards functioned, and that he really, really was trying to evoke a certain sense with each card. And so what happened was, early Magic was very much about making cards, giving cards function and giving cards a reality where the mechanics really brought them to life.

And like I said, early Magic is—there’s a lot of things that have been grandfathered. For example. One of black’s shticks is black, most of its kill spells cannot kill everything. That there’s always an exception built into a lot of them.

 

The most common exception is “non-black.” You know, you can’t kill black things. Well, why is that? Because Richard made a card called Terror long ago, and the idea of Terror was, “I’m going to frighten you to death.”  Well, other black things, they don’t scare quite as easily. They’re used to some pretty creepy things. And artifact creatures, they don’t even have the capacity for fear. So Terror was like, “Okay, well I scare to death non-black and non-artifact creatures,” because that’s the flavor he was going for.

And what happened with time was that started getting ingrained in what black meant, even though the flavor actually came from trying to represent the idea of scaring you to death. And so a lot of Magic early on, the mechanical choices that Richard made were based to try to make individual cards have flavor.

Now, there’s lots of good came from it, and Magic is the game it is because of that. I mean, I think the reason Magic took off—and remember, early Magic, it was just from the gates, from the start, it was just this exploding thing. And I think there’s a lot to do with it, the golden trifecta of the trading card game, the mana system, the color wheel, all those, I think played into it.

But another factor was Richard made it fun. Richard made it exciting. He kind of figured out what you wanted, and gave it to you. And he did that really, really well.

Now, one of the downsides of the First Age is when you focus on making decisions on a card-by-card level, you make inconsistencies. And that is one of the problems—beginning at the Second Age, that’s one of the problems that sort of spurred the Second Age.

So what happened was, historically, give a little history here, is Richard made Alpha, Richard then made Arabian Nights, and then Richard came to Wizards and started working full time, and Wizards, with the explosion of Magic, what had happened is trading card games became hot, Richard was busy working on other trading card games.

He made a game called Jyhad, that later got renamed Vampire: The Eternal Struggle, he made a game called Netrunner, he would later make a game called BattleTech. He also made a Star Wars game. Richard made a whole bunch of different trading card games. And that so once he got there, his focus moved from Magic to other trading card games.

Now, he was around, and he was giving input. I mean, definitely people asked his opinion of things. But Richard was busy doing other games. So they had to hire other people to be making Magic. Well, one of the people they hired was a guy named Joel Mick.

So Joel was one of the original playtesters. There were different playtest groups, he was in the playtest group that I think Richard met through his bridge club. And it was the group that would later go on to design Mirage. So it included Joel, Bill Rose, current VP of R&D, Charlie Catino, Lily… what was Lily’s maiden name? [NLH—Wu.] Lily would later end up going on to marry Richard.

But anyway, the bridge club he met a bunch of people, a bunch of the ended up making, like I said, making Mirage, and Joel actually even worked for the East Coast Playtesters on the Antiquities expansion.

But anyway, Joel came to the company early, early enough that I would consider him first wave of R&D, and first wave, I’ve explained before, is the R&D that were playtesters that sort of came to Wizards when Magic hit it big.

And so Joel became the first person who had—I’ll use the term “Head Designer,” at the time, Head Designer and Head Developer were one person. It was one job. And so Joel was in charge of both overseeing Design and Development.

Now Magic has progressed enough and the skill sets are unique enough that we’ve now divided them. Where there’s a Head Designer in charge of Design, and there’s a Head Developer in charge of Development. And at the time it was one role. But anyway, I’m going to call it Head Designer, but be aware that he also did development.

So Joel, Joel’s main guidance—and Joel was the Head Designer for a while, and later would go on to become Brand Manager of Magic. Joel was very much about consolidation. That one of the big problems that happened in early Magic was, because everything got decided on a card-by-card basis, there was a lot of inconsistencies. For example, cards that did similar things wouldn’t work exactly the same. Or one card would have rulings put to it, and another card would have different rulings put to it, each one the rulings were meant to make sense with that card, but they were inconsistent. That the rules didn’t work the same.

And so Joel was one of the big proponents of pushing the idea of the Sixth Edition rules, which were the rules that consolidated a lot of Magic, that cleaned a lot of things up. And Joel was a big part of the idea of—the reason Mirage in my mind is the start of the Second Age is it’s the beginning of the block.

I mean, Ice Age was sort of a proto-block, but really Alliances was only as an afterthought sort of paired as an expansion to Ice Age. When it was designed it really wasn’t—in fact, we in development did a lot of energy to kind of connect the two. I mean, there was no reference to “snow-covered,” in their design, I don’t think there were any cantrips in their design. There’s a lot of things, like they were just making new and fun cards, and we had to go back and use a lot of flavor and a little bit of mechanical connectedness just to make Alliances feel like it was an extension of Ice Age, because I think in their minds it wasn’t.

Where Mirage, Mirage and Visions were actually designed together and meant to go together. Weatherlight was a little bit of a tack-on at the end, and that was designed by a different group. But it was the beginning of the modern-day, what we think of as a block.

And I mean, in my mind the Second Age—okay, now we get into the Second Age, the Second Age was about having a cohesion to the design. Saying “We need to make rules and things that will allow us to make consistencies in the game.” And so under Second Age, the idea was “Let’s stop doing extraneous designs. If a design isn’t fulfilling what the card needs to do functionally, let’s not do that. Let’s make the cards as clean as we can and as simple as we can, and try to make sure that the things that are similar are clumped together and work the same.”

And, on top of that, the idea of a block was “Let’s take multiple sets in a year, and give them cohesion.” So before that, in the first design, every set was kind of “Here’s new stuff! Here’s new stuff! Here’s new stuff!”

And I think what Joel realized is, “Look. There is a limit of how much new stuff you have.” And that Joel was the first person to say, “Okay, we need to consolidate a little bit. So let’s make each year about one thing.” I mean, a couple things. Usually there were two keyword mechanics back in the early days.

But let’s focus a little bit. Mirage is about this setting. And also, the other thing is by consolidating, a block allows you to have a unified setting. And what the unified setting did is it allowed Creative to make one world.

Now, early Magic, if you remember for those that know, was much—I mean, most of it all took place on the same place. This was on Dominaria. But it was different parts of Dominaria. So the worlds had a different feel. Mirage was in Jamuura, which was an African-inspired continent, but it was very different from Terisiaire or other sections of Dominaria, to give it a different feel. Later on we would go on to really exploring new worlds, new planes, but that would come later.

Okay, so the Second Age of Design consolidated, cleaned up, had rules, it was very much about making things connect and making things easier to comprehend. Joel, by the way, was also the person, he was the Brand Manager, who got the rarities marked on the card. Who put collector numbers on the card. That started saying, “You know what? There’s some functionality we need on the card to ease the process of collecting the cards.” And so I think Joel’s reign—I suppose on some level as Head Designer and as Brand Manager, was simplifying and cleaning up and consolidating what Magic was.

Okay. Now we get to the Third Age, which starts with Invasion. And that is the introduction of Bill Rose as Head Designer. Okay, so Bill Rose and I started literally the same month. Bill was one of the original playtesters, although he’s second-wave R&D, he’s the one second-wave R&D person that actually started as a playtester and knew all the first-wave crowd very well. Was friends with them.

And so although we started at the same time, Bill had a little bit of a leg up in that he was very well-familiar and comfortable with everybody else in R&D. So Bill, when Bill took over as Head Designer, I think the thing that I attribute Invasion, the start of the Third Age of Design, is about the idea of theme. Is saying, “Okay, it’s not…” I mean, Joel, in the Second Age, made sure that each design, each block had a cohesion to it.

But the it didn’t have a mechanical cohesion. Well, it didn’t in the following regard. What Joel did is said, “Okay. We have a mechanic, we have two mechanics usually, two named mechanics. We’re going to introduce them in the first set, we’re going to evolve them in the second two sets. So okay, these are the things this block cares about.” But those two mechanics didn’t need to necessarily be tied together. You look at Mirage, it was Flanking and Phasing. Tempest it was Shadow and Buyback. Urza’s Saga it was Echo and Cycling.

The mechanics didn’t really have much to do with each other. They were two separate things. Now, some of the designers, like I know in Tempest I tried to make them thematically interact with one another, in contrast, but anyway, the difference there was the start of the Third Age of Design is like “Okay, what is this block about?” It has a theme.

Invasion is about multicolor. All the pieces that went into it—kicker was chosen as a mechanic because it worked well with multicolor. Split cards worked well because it worked well with multicolor. If you look at the different components of what was put in the set, domain was in the set, because it worked well in a set where you’re playing lots of colors.

And so the key to the Third Age was an idea of a mechanical cohesion to what was going on. And that tended to come out in a theme. So if you look at the sets I’m talking about, Invasion was a multicolor block. Odyssey was a graveyard block. Onslaught was a tribal block. Mirrodin was an artifact block. And then Champions of Kamigawa was a top-down Japanese block. That you started to see a sense of cohesion to what was going on.

And  if you start to look at Bill, I think Bill’s big thing was—I think Joel was trying to get all the ducks in a row and make things consistent, and that Bill took it to the next step. Bill said, “Okay, not only do we want to be consistent, but we want to be thematically consistent.”

And Bill very much pushed the idea of trying—because one of the things that you realized as the game got older, was in the early days, every expansion was exciting because there just weren’t that many expansions. “Oh my God, it’s the sixth expansion!” But as you started getting into the 30, 40 expansions, you need to do stuff to really make it different.

And so Bill was like, “Okay, it’s the multicolor block. We’ve never had a multicolor block. It’s the graveyard block. We’ve never had a graveyard block.” And I think a lot of Bill’s contribution as Head Designer was the idea of, “We need to sort of flavor each block in a way that gives it its own identity.”

Okay. So, from Bill, the next Head Designer is me! So what happened was, Bill has always been interested in management. In fact, the job before he came to Wizards, he ran a chemistry lab back in Philadelphia. Bill very much wanted to manage, and so Bill eventually worked his way up to become the VP of R&D. And for a while, Bill was both the VP of R&D and the Head Designer/Head Developer. But eventually it became clear that he couldn’t do that.

And so he ended up hiring Randy Buehler to sort of oversee that. And what happened was, while Randy Buehler had the skill set to oversee Development, he didn’t really have the skill set to oversee Design. And Randy quickly figured out that he needed somebody that could sort of watch Design. And so that ended up being me.

So Ravnica, if you’ll notice, what I call the Fourth Age of Design, Ravnica was the first what I call block design. And the idea is, before that, the way we were designing sets is, we would make a large set. And we would pick out some mechanics, we knew, in Joel’s days, it’s like “Okay, we have flanking and phasing,” or whatever. In Bill’s time it was like “Okay, it’s the multicolor block.”

And we would just design the second set with—we’d leave ourselves some hooks, we’d know some evolutions of mechanics, but we kind of just painted the first room, and then got to the second room and painted, and then got to the third room and we’d often paint ourselves in a corner, because we would not do a good job of figuring out “Well, where exactly are we going?”

So during Invasion, we kind of stumbled onto something. What happened was we were making different cards, and Henry Stern and I had come—independently, ironically—had come up with the idea of “Maybe what we want to do to make things easier is save the enemy color stuff, just do the ally color. And then in the last set we can do the enemy color.” And that was probably the earliest, earliest sort of sense of a block design, where there’s something about it.

And the interesting thing is, Apocalypse sold really well. Traditionally in Magic, the third sets have always had issues, especially because “Hey, we do something, we do more, we do more.” That by the third set, people are getting tired of it, and so we started having to try to drum up the third set a little bit. And kind of our goal with Apocalypse was to give the third set some identity, but what we ended up doing is making it the earliest block structure.

So what happened was, when I had the assignment for Ravnica, my goal was “We’re doing a multicolor block.” Now, we had done a multicolor block. A lot of what Bill was planning off of was “Here’s an identity. We’ve never done this thing.” Well, we had done this theme, we had done Invasion. And so my job was to try to figure out how to make it not Invasion.

And while doing that, I figured out that I wanted to plot it out. I wanted to figure out where things were going. And with that mindset, I ended up coming up with the guild model that said, “Oh, okay, well, we’re going to take this thing and chop it into three pieces. And when you see the first piece, you’re going to figure out the later pieces. You might not know exactly, but… and by the time you see the second piece, you know the third piece.” That it was something in which there was much planning in going into it.

And a lot of what I was trying to do during what we consider the Fourth Age, my big thing was that I wanted us to think a little bigger. Now, if you notice, if you follow along, First Age is very card-focused. It’s very centered on the cards. Second Age is more group-focused, looking at making mechanics work consistently, making sure that a block had the same things in it. That it’s looking for a general set of structure. And it even thought about the sense of blocks, although it was a little more mechanical-centered. But you get to the Third Age, and now it’s “Okay, now it’s themes. It’s growing even wider. What is this block about?” We get to the Fourth Age, now we’re designing the blocks themselves. The concept of the blocks, how do the blocks work?

And I think it’s very important that if you watch as we evolve, if you watch the design technology, it is about getting a larger and larger scope with time. That I think as we’ve gotten better at understanding how things work, we’re sort of pulling back and going to the next layer. If you want to think of it as… an onion? What has layers? That… although we keep adding layers rather than taking layers off. So maybe the onion’s not the perfect metaphor. Paper mâché? I’m not sure the metaphor I’m going for here.But we sort of work on something, and we keep adding to it, and I mean we don’t lose what comes before it, although there’s an interesting thing that will come up when I get to Fifth Age.

So anyway, what happens is that Fourth Age was about just thinking in the sense of our job as designers is much broader than just individual cards and individual mechanics and even individual sets. That we are trying to create an overall experience, part of that experience is making it have cohesion and making it have identity, and that I think that Third Age was very much about giving each block a very strong identity, and that Fourth Age was about giving each set a very strong identity.

Okay. Now, the interesting thing is Fourth Age to Fifth Age is the only time the Head Designer doesn’t change, because I was still there. But I like to think that Fifth Age was a combination of a conclusion that I had come to, and something that I think Aaron Forsythe has a lot to do with the Fifth Age of Design. Now let me explain.

Okay. So what happened is, Aaron, quick story who Aaron is, I originally had got Aaron to work on the website because I thought he’d be very good. We ended up putting him on Fifth Dawn to be on the design team, just to get a fresh perspective, thought maybe we’d get a good article out of it, he ended up doing awesome, we ended up bringing him to R&D, for a while I was his boss and I was pruning him to be a designer… pruning’s not the right word. I was prepping him. I was working with him to become a designer.

And then when Brian… I’m blanking on his name, Brian, the Head Developer who did Ravnica and Time Spiral. Brian Schneider. When Brian Schneider left, there was a vacancy for Head Developer, and Aaron stepped into that. Aaron hadn’t really thought about it, but he had done some development and ended up becoming Head Developer. Shortly after that, Randy left, and there was a job for the Director. He ended up doing that… (???), Aaron reported to me, and within like two years I reported to Aaron. It was a very fast series of events.

And so Aaron was trying to figure out how to reinvigorate the core set. And so one of the things that Aaron did is he went back and looked at Alpha, looked at the Beta sheets on the wall, and he figured out that over time the design had… while it had done a lot of good work to create larger cohesion, it had lost a little bit of the magic that Alpha had. And Aaron—we now refer to this as resonance. Which is when you come to something, the more that that thing has something that means something to you, that there’s some emotional weight to it, the more you bond with it.

And the idea was, in Alpha, the reason people bonded quickly is that Richard took just staple things of fantasy and brought them to life in the game. And that when you saw a white knight, you think “Of course! Protection from [black]!” and “Oh, first strike! Of course, that’s a white knight!” And that it really connected you to Magic.

And then the reason was, the things that Richard was tying into, be it the color wheel, be it different creatures, were things that if you were familiar with fantasy or even just… not even fantasy, the color wheel in my mind ties into human psyche, that you got it. And it made sense to you and you understood. And that there was an excitement that came about.

And Aaron came to the conclusion that we had lost a little of that along the way. That we had done so much to mechanically make things work that we had lost a little bit of the feeling, if you will.

And so Aaron brought about the idea of resonance. So Magic 2010 was the core set where Aaron really redid it. I mean, it was the core set for example to have new cards, and Aaron did a big push on making top-down stuff and doing a lot more resonant things.

So meanwhile, behind the scenes at the same time, I was wrestling with a different problem. Which was we our acquisition was going down. I was trying to figure out how to turn that time. Matt Place and I came up with the concept of New World Order. Which is here’s a way to make it a little more approachable, make commons accessible. And move complexity out of common so that new people coming to the game had a little easier time.

And so New World Order and resonance kind of hit at the same time. So the first set that kind of had both was Zendikar. But Zendikar still—the reason I don’t think the Fifth Age of Design started until Scars was we—it was a bottom-up set working off land design, and that we after the fact figured out we wanted to add this “adventure world” sheen to it. And I had enough room that I was able to add some mechanics to do that. But Zendikar at its core was still—the way it was built was “Hey, let’s find a mechanical hook and then build around it.”

Scars did something a little different. Scars of Mirrodin, which is the start in my mind of the Fifth Age of Design. Scars was like, “I want to tell you a story. I want to build you a world.” And so I took to heart Aaron’s resonance thing, and I took it to the next level.

Which was I said, “You know what? One of the things that’s most important…” and it’s funny, I’ve talked about how writers have a theme. That carries throughout them throughout. And I’ve talked about this. My theme is how people like to think that they function intellectually, but in the end we’re very run by our emotions.

And I came to realize that I was doing the same thing in design. That I was designing with my head and not my heart. I was thinking about how people thought about my set, and not how they felt about my set. And this was a big, big change for me. And I said, “You know what? I want to make sure that my designs evoke an emotion out of my audience.” And so I said, “Okay. I’m introducing the Phyrexians. These are, in my mind, the badasses of Magic. These are…”

I refer to that I consider the Phyrexians to be the ultimate bad guys in my mind of Magic. That they are this environmental villain that just really, really works in the kind of stories that Magic wants to tell. That when they attack, they attack environmentally. Which is a way they just seep through a card set. And, because they convert things that are there, they are a very flexible villain, they can overlay on different worlds. And you’ll get different things. Which is kind of cool.

But anyway, I wanted you to have a sense of the Phyrexians. I wanted you to feel violated. I wanted the Phyrexians to have this just—a sense. I wanted an emotion. And that was the first set where I said, “You know what? I need the audience to feel something. That the goal of my design is not how they’re gonna think about it, but how they’re gonna feel about it.”

And this is a fundamental, fundamental shift. This is how, why Fifth Age in my mind is a very different animal than Fourth Age. That if you look from Scars of Mirrodin forward, I’ve picked my mechanics based on creating an essence and a feel. That there’s an emotional response I’m trying to get.

Now the funny thing is, I think I succeeded a little too well with the Phyrexians. I made them so invasive that people were like, “Ugh! The Phyrexians kind of annoy me.” You know, that it really got under people’s skin. And that I think there’s a very love/hate relationship with the Phyrexians now, because I really succeeded in making them kind of disturbing. For good or bad, I succeeded very well in that task. And that one of the things was I wanted you the player, when you play the set, to feel something. And that I have been working hard to pick mechanics that evoke that.

I talk a lot about piggybacking, I’ve done a podcast on that. I mean, resonance ties into this. What I want to do is I want to figure out what baggage comes with what we’re doing that I get to work with, and then I want to figure out, “What exactly do I want?” When you’re playing my game, the game, the set I’m working on, when I’m playing it, not just what do I expect you to do as a player, but how do I want you to feel about it?

And that to me has completely shaped modern design. In that one of the things that I do now, when we do advanced planning is, I’m like “What’s the world about? What’s the emotion you’re going for? What’s the feel you’re going for? When people play your game, what do you want them to feel?”

And the reason, for example, I’ll use Innistrad and Theros as clean examples, that Innistrad was about dread. Was about trying to recapture the sense of horror in that I wanted you to be afraid. And a big reason for example to have the transform mechanic is I wanted things to come in play. Like the werewolves, where like you saw the humans and you knew, you knew that the werewolves were coming. And that that was scary because you knew the werewolves were going to be trouble. 

Or we had morbid, where like things would come in play and you knew that things dying were trouble. And all of a sudden, when I chump block? It made you sweat a little bit. “Oh my God, he might have something, and she might have something, or I need to worry about that. Oh, is it okay to just kill the thing?” And I was trying very hard in that set to create the sense of dread.

Where, in Theros, I was trying to create the sense of accomplishment. Of adventure. That you are building something. That you are achieving something. And the whole set is about building things up and creating the biggest hero or the biggest monster or the biggest god you can. And that you are working towards something.

And then what I’ve discovered is, if each set creates its own sort of emotion, when your audience plays it—because remember, the big, big job of a designer is to make the set do two things. I mean, first and foremost, is to make the players enjoy themselves. And second is to make the players experience something.

And that hopefully that experience is part of the thing that makes it fun for them. But I mean, whenever I make a set, I want to figure out what is my audience experiencing? And what are they enjoying? Those are intertwined, hopefully what they experience and what they’re enjoying is connected, but they’re slightly different things.

Remember, by the way, that you can enjoy things that aren’t all positive. My perfect example is that I might go to a horror movie and feel horrible fear. Well, you know what? Fear in general is not a good sensation. But in an environment where I understand that I’m safe, that it’s a movie, I’m not actually in danger, it’s a visceral rush. It’s fun. It’s kind of fun to have a lot of the different feelings, the highs and lows. Especially when it’s in a safe environment. Once again, create comfort, then add surprise. So, the Fifth Age very much was creating this feeling.

So now, let’s recap, since I’m not super far from work. So I think what has happened with design, and in some ways we’ve come full circle, in some sense. I think where Richard started is a place that I’ve ended up to in a different way. I think Richard very much did care about how things felt and what emotion he was evoking out of his audience.

Now, he did it in a little different way, in that a lot of what Richard did was just make sure a lot of individual things had the sense he wanted. And what’s happened over time was, I had to find a way to get the cohesion that Joel and Bill needed, but also had the emotional response, that had the resonance, that… you know, and that one of the things that I’m very proud of is Magic is twenty years old. There are not a lot of games that get to say they’re twenty years old. But, and here’s the interesting thing, Magic constantly changes. So not only is Magic twenty years old, it’s a constantly evolving twenty-year-old game. That a lot of games that have lasted twenty years, it’s like, “Well, they make their thing, they do it, they do it well, done.”

Scrabble, other than minor, minor dictionary changes, is Scrabble. Monopoly is Monopoly. Chess is Chess. And yeah, over the years little tiny changes have happened. The public has made house rules that got popular enough that eventually they folded it into the rules, there’s little tiny changes that happen over time. But pretty much they’re static games.

Where Magic is anything but a static game! It literally changes—I mean, not only does it change—forget us adding new cards to the environment. Just the metagame will change! Just players—the way we design Magic is, we create tools in a system and let the audience do what they want to do with it. We guide them, obviously. And then see what they do with it. See where they go.

And then one of the exciting things about it is, we are kind of making—I mean, Magic in my mind, in my head, I think of Magic as being a living organism. In that it’s alive. And that we shape it, and we definitely sort of have some impact on how it’s shaped, but we don’t control it.

And the players don’t completely control it. That’s one of the things that’s why I kind of feel it’s alive. That no one person controls it. A lot of people have an impact on it, but because it’s a thing that—for example, when I design a set, I’m not the only person who’s making the set. I have a design team, there’s a development team, there’s a creative team, there’s an editing team, there’s a rules team. There are all these people working together, and what we make is the combined effort of all of us.

And then, what it becomes to the public is combined with the public’s—what they do with it. And one of the things that’s very interesting, and I feel like a proud papa—I mean, Magic is not my creation, it’s Richard’s creation, but I’ve been around for a lot of its upbringing. I feel like maybe the adoptive father. That I’ve been around for much of Magic’s upbringing, and I really, I’m very, very proud of all of the love and all the people and all the hard work. I mean, Magic is where it’s at because hundreds of people and thousands and thousands of players have all gotten us to where we’ve got.

And it is pretty remarkable. Like I said, I at home have a bookcase, sorry, multiple bookcases in my den, I have two full bookcases plus in my basement two more bookcases of games. I have tons and tons and tons and tons and tons and tons and tons of games. I love games. I play a lot of games.

And Magic is by far, by far the best game I’ve ever played. It is my favorite game. I love Magic. And it’s exciting to be part of it, it’s exciting to be there, and the reason that I think I love Magic so much is it has this quality that is unique to any other game I’ve ever seen. That it is kind of a living, breathing entity, and I’m excited to see where it goes. I’m excited to see what happens to it.

That one of the joys of being on design is that I get to watch the set get born, if you will. And watch it evolve and grow and become the mature set you guys all get to see. By the way, if you’re wondering why I’m waxing poetically, I’m waiting in traffic. For some reason there’s some traffic. I’m very, very close to work. Normally I would be two minutes from work. But I have not moved. I’m sitting in a traffic jam. This seems to be a theme the last couple months. It’s hard to get to work.

Anyway, let me give a final sort of thought as I sit here in traffic. I think that as we look at Magic over the years and look at Magic technology, that one of the things that has happened is that I often talk about iteration. I believe that good design is a process of iteration. That it’s about doing something and then getting feedback and then making changes and then doing it again.

And if you watch how we do design, literally, you want to know how we design? Here’s how we design. We make a card file. We playtest it. We take notes on our playtest. We make changes based on those notes. We playtest again. And we do that for a year. I mean, the iteration process gets shorter as time goes along, the playtests early on might be 3-4 weeks apart, where at the end they’re a week apart. But nonetheless, that’s how we do it. We iterate.

Now, if you stand back and you look at Magic design from a big standpoint, it’s the same thing. We iterate. And here’s how I think of it in a meta-sense. We make a design. We put it out there, we see what happens. We take notes on that design. The public gives us a response. And we learn what people like and don’t like. So one of the things I talked about, and this is a famous thing from Malcolm Gladwell, that how do you get to become an expert at something? Which is 10,000 hours with constant feedback.

And so Magic has had its 10,000 hours and has its constant feedback. So one of the things that I hope that all of you understand is, one of the reasons Magic is so special is the input of the player base. That we have gone way out of our way to give you guys a voice. So that we understand what you like and don’t like. Because Magic is an iterative process in a big level. We make a set. You give us feedback, we change things based on the feedback, and then we make a new set. And Magic’s been iterating for 20 years. And that’s pretty exciting. That is a pretty cool thing. That there aren’t games on the market that iterate at the speed of…

And one of the reasons I think Magic is such a good game is, it has been iterated for 20 years. Most games iterate, you make them, and they’re done. And then that’s the game. And yeah, maybe if they become a classic game, there’s a little tiny bit of iteration. Yes, chess has evolved a little tiny bit over the years. But it is a slow, slow iteration. En passant                 probably happened after a thousand years of chess going by. And by the way, as iterations go, I’m not a big fan of en passant. I’ll get letters now. “How dare you!”

To be fair, by the way, while I’m not a big chess player, I’m a big fan of the model of chess. I think chess is a very interesting game to study as a game designer. It is clearly a game that sort of iterated and found a nice place. I mean, it has flaws being a thousand years old, but the flaws are—they are baked into the system in a way that they’re part of what makes the game the game. I believe your flaws are your greatest strengths pushed too far. So a lot of chess flaws come from its strengths, and I think that’s—a lot of Magic’s flaws come from its strengths.

But the thing that I think sets Magic apart from a lot of other games is the fact that we have been iterating for twenty years means that we have been evolving and improving. And I think that Magic got to a place that most games don’t get to. Most games don’t get the amount of people working on it that Magic has working on it. Most games don’t get the number of people—I mean, I think one of the neat things about this whole process is that we are able to take Magic and learn and change.

And that if you look at the evolution of Magic, I mean one of the things that I think is fun when I go back and look at the different stages of Magic, is trying to understand what it means. What each of the stages has meant. And in my mind, really what it’s meant is that each stage has sort of—we’ve learned things along the way. We learned things players liked and didn’t like, and then we’ve incorporated them.

And that one of the things that’s funny is when I get new designers in, there is a lot of tribal knowledge. There’s a lot of things we do that “Why do we do them? Well, we’ve learned it works.” We’ve learned that “This is something that through trial and error worked. That we iterated and got there.”

And then, from time to time, we have to stop and ask ourselves, “Oh, this thing that we’ve assumed is just the way it is, is that 100% right? Did we make assumptions that aren’t correct on it?”

So one of the things is, I’ve been doing this stuff for eighteen years. Okay? Eighteen years. It’s hard to do anything eighteen years. And people say to me, “Well, aren’t you tired of it?” I mean, I’ve pretty much been doing the same job for eighteen years. I mean, I wasn’t always Head Designer, but I’ve been designing Magic for eighteen years.

And people say to me, “Okay, Mark, when are you moving on? Have you got it? Have you got your fill of it?” And what I say is, “No, you don’t understand. It’s not done.” Like, my job, whenever I go to do a Magic set, we are evolving. We are learning, and we are doing things different than we did before.

For example, I was around for each of these stages. I mean, I was there for the tail, tail end of First Age. But I was around for Alliances. But I was there for each of the stages. I went through that stage. It wasn’t like I knew better. I didn’t. We learned. And we learned at each stage about how to make it better.

And here’s the awesome thing. Are you ready for the awesome thing? There’s a Sixth Stage coming. The Fifth Stage is not the last stage of Magic. We are going to figure out other ways to make Magic even better. And I don’t know what they are. That’s the awesome thing. By the way. Why do I keep doing this job? Because when I was working on the First Stage, I didn’t know the Second Stage yet. When I was working on the Second Stage, I didn’t know the Third Stage. I didn’t know the Fourth Stage. I didn’t know the Fifth Stage.

That I’ve been able to be along to watch the discovery, and sometimes make the discovery, of Magic. And watch it evolve. And I know there’s a Sixth Stage right now just waiting to be found! And that my job as Head Designer is to try to find the Sixth Stage. Is to figure out “What’s the next step of evolution?” You know. And the key to doing that, the key to doing it, is to try to make the Fifth Stage, to improve the Fifth Stage to the best I can. To make the best possible Fifth Stage. To keep evolving and iterating that I am taking the last big change and making it do the best thing it can.

Because what will happen, and history’s shown me this, is that in trying to make the Fifth Stage the best stage we can, I will discover, or somebody else if not me, will discover the essence that makes the Sixth Stage.

And that—why don’t I get bored after eighteen years? Because my job is not the same job. The game I make this year is not the game I made five years ago, it’s not the game I made ten years ago. That it keeps changing. And my role keeps changing. And that what I have to do and how I have to do it keeps changing. Because what happens is, I get good at something. And once I get good at it, I look for ways to keep improving. And then I find new skills that I do not yet have, and try to improve on those.

Like I said, we spent a lot of time figuring out how to consolidate things and make them uniform so the game had a cohesiveness to it. And in doing that, as Aaron noticed, we had lost track of something that we had to find again. We had to find the spirit. We had to find the emotion.

And now that we’re doing that, I think we’re doing a really good job. I’m super happy with Theros. And, I mean the funny thing is, not only am I done with Theros, I’m done with Huey, which you guys won’t see until next fall, I’m working on Blood, the year after that. And I’m working on advanced design for the set after that! And I’m working on my seven-year plan for seven years after that! There’s all sorts of stuff coming.

I mean here’s the thing that’s amazing, that you guys—I mean, I can’t give you details here, but there is so much awesome coming! There is so many—like the fact that the hardest part of my job is, I have to wait two to three years. We do amazing things, and then I have to wait for you guys to see it. There is so much awesomeness in our future. Magic has—like, if you think that Magic is resting on its laurels, if you think that Magic has nowhere to go, well you are wrong, I live in the future, I know what it is, and it’s frickin’ going to be awesome. And I’ve got to wait until you guys—I have to wait for you guys to see it. Not that what’s coming up isn’t awesome. It’s all awesome. But I mean…

Anyway, Magic design is constantly evolving. That is my lesson of today. Which is if you love Magic and love watching it evolve, you are in luck! Because it is doing that. It is constantly doing that. And I’m happy to say that it’s continuing to do that. And there’s… man. There is such cool stuff coming that you guys have no idea. And I… I will have to sit by and watch. Eventually I will get to see it! And to be fair, everything coming is awesome. Theros block is awesome. It’s great new stuff coming in Theros block.

Huey block is awesome, there’s amazing things coming in Huey block. Blood block is awesome! There’s great stuff coming there. So we will keep iterating if you guys keep playing.

Anyway, if you cannot tell, if you cannot tell, I am passionate about Magic design. Very, very much. I love what I do, it’s my dream job, the fact that I get to drive to work and talk about this and get so excited about it is because I love what I do. And I’m glad you guys are here. Hopefully we are delivering. I want to knock this out of the park every chance we can. I want Magic to keep iterating and become… I don't know. I think it is the best game, but I want it to become even better. That if Magic is amazing with twenty years innovation, what happens with thirty? What happens with forty? What happens with fifty?

Anyway, I’m now at work. And I’ve got to go. So anyway, thanks for joining me today on what has been a very passionate podcast. And long podcast. But thank you guys for joining me, and I have to happily go be making Magic. Talk to you guys next time.